iPad-using Amazon MP3 customers can now use the Cloud Player app in native form.

Amazon's Cloud Player app is now optimized for the full-sized iPad and iPad mini's screen.

Not everyone who owns an iDevice regularly interacts with Apple's media ecosystem—especially since the launch of Amazon MP3. But although Amazon MP3 customers have always been able to download their music on a computer and transfer it to their iPads through iTunes, they haven't been able to benefit from Amazon's companion app/service that lets you stream music directly from the cloud. Until today, that is—Amazon announced that its Cloud Player app, previously only available to iPhone and iPod touch, is now available for iPad and iPad mini users as well.

The app, which has been available on other iOS devices since last summer, allows users to buy music from Amazon and have it automatically transferred to Cloud Player, streamable from any iOS device. Users can also opt to download music from the cloud for offline use, though it must still be played through the Cloud Player app. Anecdotally, I know a good number of iPad-using Amazon customers who have been grumbling about the lack of a "real" iPad version of this app (they tend to use the iPhone version, blown up to 2x), so Wednesday's release is sure to make plenty of users happy. If you've already downloaded a version of Cloud Player for iPhone or iPod touch, you don't need to download it again; Amazon updated its existing app to be universal.

But Amazon giveth and Amazon taketh away—if only temporarily. The company also just issued an update to the Kindle iPhone and iPad app—version 3.6.1—but is now warning iOS users not to install the new version of the app. The latest version apparently has a bug that will delete your entire Kindle library, and Amazon is aware of the issue. "If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time," the company wrote in its App Store description, so if you haven't updated in the last 12 hours or so, it sounds like it's worth waiting until a new version can be released.

++ Apparently it's now TOO easy to update my apps! Well hopefully if I don't actually open the app, the contents will be fine. I should probably let me wife know, as she's more of the Kindle app reader...

Too late for me. I'm in the (stoopid?) habit of "update all" promptly as soon as updates are available. I got bit. Soon as I started Kindle, I was forced to register a new device. All settings and downloads lost. (Probably they're sitting around somewhere taking up space on my iPad.) I griped to the Amazon folks this morning and got a response something like, "Aw... We're sorry..." Boo, hoo, pauvre de moi

[ edit: later, that very same day ] Kindle "update" installed, no help. Kindle app removed and re-installed, no help. Online chat with Amazon: go to "Manage my Kindle devices", delete all devices, then delete and re-install Kindle app, and start from scratch. If need be, return to "Manage my Kindle devices" and rename the device as desired. Re-download all books. Restore all settings as desired. IOW, yer outta luck, pard.

I'm not gonna hate on the "Install All" button. I mean obviously, if I know something's wrong with one of the updates, I'll update individually and not hit "Install All." And if I do that accidentally, it's my own fault. 99.99% of the time, it's a great, convenient feature (and one that is completely optional). If I were in the habit of researching updates to make sure nothing was wrong with them, I wouldn't use "Install All" anyway until I was sure they were OK. So "Install All" really has nothing to do with anything.

Welp, my wife did download the update yesterday, and it did wipe her data on her iPad. But she just logged back in and re-downloaded the book she was reading. I guess if you want to look on the bright side, it cleared out some space by wiping the books she had already read.

I certainly can see the need for a quick "pull this update NOW!" option for developers. But then again, I can also see how Apple could take a position of "screw you. We're not going to drop everything, just because you can't be bothered to test your app before you submit it." It totally sucks for consumers (including my wife), but I could see a "yank this update now" panic button just used as an easy crutch for developers to not care whether there's a huge flaw in their app, since they could just request Apple yank the app immediately at the first sign of massive problems. Not unless Apple charges them in order to keep it from being abused.

It looks like 3.6.2 is up there now. The update said it contained fixes for registration or something like that. I did have to sign back in to my Amazon account when I ran the app, and I don't appear to have any books downloaded, besides PDFs I sent to myself via "send to Kindle." I know I had some books on the device prior, but it's not such a big deal to download them again, luckily.

I don't understand how a bug that deletes your entire library make it out of QA? I mean, it's not exactly a subtle effect!

It forces a re-registration. It's possible that whatever bug forces the re-registration didn't affect the QA team for some reason. Maybe it doesn't force the re-registration if your phone is using Amazon's internal network through WiFi and the QA protocol doesn't include "test updating over a non-Amazon network". (I'm totally just throwing out a possibility, I have no direct knowledge of anything.)

Obviously, this would still represent a failure of the QA process, it just might not be as obvious a failure as "nobody noticed their library disappeared from the device".

EDIT: Don't get me wrong. It's also possible that nobody noticed their library disappeared from the device. But that's not the only possible explanation for this slipping through.

And why is there no quick, easy way for a developer to roll back a defective update on the App Store? Apple shares some of the blame here.

Luckily Amazon has enough clout to get a fast approval on this emergency bug fix, but the burden has been on devs for a long time to properly QA releases. At least they identified the bug quickly, shows that they take bug reports seriously.

It would definitely be nice for Apple to give a way to offer a previous version, but once a new binary is uploaded and approved it takes the place of the old one. The way around this in the past was to back up your device to your local iTunes Library. If you downloaded an update on your Mac, the old version got stuck into the trash. You could retrieve it and reinsert it in your library if there was ever an issue.

Now with USB-Free and iCloud that's kind of an antique-y way of doing things.

May want to clean up your description of how Amazon Cloud Player works... your article:

"The app, which has been available on other iOS devices since last summer, allows users to buy music from Amazon and have it automatically transferred to Cloud Player, streamable from any iOS device..."

is misleading in that (like Kindle books or Amazon Instant Video media) you MUST buy your MP3's on Amazon's website. Due to Apple's in-app purchase 30% royalty restriction on such media, Amazon cannot produce apps with in-app purchasing that circumvents Apple's in-app purchasing framework or doesn't provide a kickback to Apple for such. Being both a dedicated Apple user and dedicated Amazon Cloud(Everything) user, this can be particularly annoying.

Also, someone at Amazon should learn how to do multi-threaded programming because trying to use the Amazon Cloud Player iOS app when you have a large music library (mine is approaching 100GB, ~2000 albums) is something of a stuttering mess while the library data sync'ing process runs on the main thread of the app. Just took about 45 minutes for it to sync just the library data before I was able to effectively navigate/use the player... sigh.

Despite this nuisance, the app itself is a breath of fresh air over the web-based player I've had to use on my iPad for the past 8 months.

So they "recommend" that people don't install, but don't tell people why?

If it deletes you entire Amazon library that's a big deal and should be a BOLD note in the message that says "You've been warned!"

Couldn't they also remove the update from the store and revert back to the previous version? Asking everyone who updated to delete and re-install the app?

It's actually not as big a deal as it sounds. All your stuff is already on their servers, synced to last page read + notes/highlights. Re-downloading is a pain, but it's not like your stuff is gone forever.

So they "recommend" that people don't install, but don't tell people why?

If it deletes you entire Amazon library that's a big deal and should be a BOLD note in the message that says "You've been warned!"

Couldn't they also remove the update from the store and revert back to the previous version? Asking everyone who updated to delete and re-install the app?

It's actually not as big a deal as it sounds. All your stuff is already on their servers, synced to last page read + notes/highlights. Re-downloading is a pain, but it's not like your stuff is gone forever.

Ah. The way it was worded in the article it sounds like it's deleted from the server too.

ArsTechnica wrote:

The latest version apparently has a bug that will delete your entire Kindle library, and Amazon is aware of the issue

OK, going out o a limb here, but here goes... While this is definitely bad QA, and I totally agree that Apple needs to provide tools for developers to blacklist versions (instead of hoping that users read update text, and/or don't press the "update all button"), why is this the end of the world?

I understand the inconvenience, but that's what this is. Your Kindle library "lives" in the cloud (ever more so, since Amazon doesn't offer tools to organize downloaded content in its Kindle apps vs. the "real" Kindle readers, thereby discouraging local storage). Your current reading location, and (if you've allowed the defaults) your bookmarks and highlights are all stored on Amazon's servers as well. At best, you lose one or two books and you have to re-download them. At worst, you have a large library downloaded locally and have to spend the time and bandwidth to re-download them.

But no data was permanently lost, certainly nothing on the order of original works (your address book, calendar, notes - or worse, full-fledged iWorks documents). You get hit by a bug, you get annoyed, and you move on and re-download. Certainly nothing here is worth posts consisting of a single four-letter explicative.

I'm not seeing a single post that suggests this IS the end of the world.

It's a glaring deficiency in Apple's system and Amazon's QA department, though. Which is all anyone has said, as far as I can tell.

Hyperbole of course, but in a similar vein as a few comments (one of which from the_frakker was responded to at the same time as I was writing and the_frakker rightly pointed out that the article might give more cause for his/her concern than necessary).

And I pre-agree with you in my original comment re: Amazon's QA and Apple's system. ;-)

Guess I was lucky. I'm an "update all-er" (weird, that sounds french in my head), but I normally glance at the update notes to see what's up and caught the warning.

Immediately went to the home screen and tapped the Kindle icon. Y'all *do* know that pauses the installation, right? I just left it paused for the rest of the day. Of course, I couldn't use my kindle app all that time, but later in the evening the message changed from "don't update" to "fix for some registration issues", so I completed the update and it seemed to be fine.